Former member of the top 10, Frenchman Lucas Pouille has fallen very low in the ATP rankings.
If you don’t follow tennis on a daily basis, you may have been surprised by the ranking of Frenchman Lucas Pouille. Descended to 675th place in the ATP rankings, the former member of the top 10 and semi-finalist of the Australian Open in 2019, experienced a very big descent into hell due to several personal problems and some injuries. Worse, Lucas Pouille almost dropped everything a year ago when he decided to take a step back from tennis to cure his depression. Asked by The Parisian in April, the former Davis Cup winner returned to this very dark period.
“I find myself in Nice hospital for a fortnight doing the hyperbaric chamber to help me heal faster. I’m surrounded by sick people, dying people, terminal cancers… And I’m here for my little one. fracture in the rib. It can help you put things into perspective, but, me, it gave me the blues. I started to have a darker side and to enter into a depression which brought me, after Roland, to England , to sleep an hour a night and to drink alone (…) I was in a bad phase. And I made the decision to say stop. Otherwise, I would have ended up in Sainte-Anne, among the madmen. For my sanity, it had to stop.”
Thanks to his wife and child, Lucas Pouille has taken to the courts around the world and the challengers to try to find his level and he is starting to achieve this. Committed to Roland-Garros qualifying, the Frenchman had an incredible week passing the three rounds to reach the main draw. In the first round, he made short work of Jurij Rodionov, whom he had already beaten in qualifying. This Wednesday, May 31, the Frenchman will play his biggest match in more than a year against the Englishman Cameron Norrie, seeded number 14 at this Roland-Garros 2023 and who beat Benoit Paire in the first round.